This Week in Congress

 Appropriations

The House Labor-Health and Human Services and Education appropriations subcommittee met on June 23 to make funding recommendations for FY’23. The subcommittee recommended $179,310,000 within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for Sexually Transmitted Diseases, an increase of $15,000,000 over the previous year’s funding level. The House appropriations full committee will meet on June 30 to approve the subcommittee’s recommendation and release the language provisions. We will provide more details after the full committee meets next week. The Senate is expected to meet later this summer to make their funding recommendations.

Guns

Early this morning, the Senate passed bipartisan legislation to address gun violence, the first major federal gun safety legislation in decades. The final vote was 65 to 33 with 15 Republicans joining Democrats in support of the bill, marking a significant bipartisan breakthrough on one of the most contentious policy issues in the country. The House is expected to take up the bill today and the legislation will then go to the President for signature. The bill includes $750 million to help states implement and run crisis intervention programs; enhances background checks for prospective gun buyers ages 18 to 21, require for the first time that juvenile records, including mental health records beginning at age 16, be vetted for potentially disqualifying material; provides incentives for states to pass “red flag” laws that allow guns to be temporarily confiscated from people deemed by a judge to be too dangerous to possess them; tightens a federal ban on domestic abusers buying firearms, and strengthen laws against straw purchasing and trafficking of guns. It also includes funding for mental health programs and to beef up security in schools.

Supreme Court Ruling

On June 23, the Supreme Court struck down a New York gun law, enacted more than a century ago, which placed restrictions on carrying a concealed handgun outside the home. “Because the State of New York issues public-carry licenses only when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense, we conclude that the State’s licensing regime violates the Constitution,” Justice Thomas wrote for the court’s 6-3 majority. The opinion changes the framework that lower courts will use going forward as they analyze other gun restrictions, which could include the proposals currently before Congress. Critics say the ruling will impair sensible solutions they think can curb gun violence.

Other Legislation and Happenings Around the Nation

Monkeypox

This week, as global monkeypox cases reached 3,300, the WHO posted a monkeypox update and removed the distinction between endemic and non-endemic to reflect a unified response. Cases have been reported in 42 countries in five global regions, with 84% of the cases reported in the European Region. Only one death has been reported to date. Public health experts, including those in the Biden administration, are increasingly concerned that the federal government’s handling of the largest-ever U.S. monkeypox outbreak is mirroring its cumbersome response to the coronavirus pandemic 2½ years ago, with potentially dire consequences. As a result, they said, community transmission is occurring largely undetected, and the critical window in which to control the outbreak is closing quickly. To date more than 150 monkeypox cases have been identified in the US in 21 states and Washington, D.C.

Two federal officials involved in the monkeypox response said there are “significantly” more cases across the US that are being missed because testing for monkeypox had not been expanded beyond the network of public health laboratories. “If we don’t move aggressively now, monkeypox is going to be that much harder to eradicate later — or it could even become endemic” in the US, said one of the administration officials, who is among more than two dozen across the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House tasked with combating the outbreak and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Experts say the US has moved too slowly to expand access to monkeypox testing and vaccinate people at highest risk. The Federal government’s failure to clearly and urgently communicate the symptoms and risks associated with has left gay and bisexual men, who are disproportionately contracting the virus, especially vulnerable, public health experts say. The plodding U.S. response so far raises doubts about the country’s preparedness for the next pandemic, some administration officials say. The response has also been hindered by U.S. physicians’ lack of familiarity with the disease. “The CDC initially publicized decades-old photos from more severe outbreaks in Africa, instead of the more subtle rashes detected in the recent global outbreak. The US was far slower than Britain and Canada to distribute updated education materials, only recently sharing photos showing what the rashes look like on fair skin, said David Harvey, Executive Director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.”

NCSD Monkeypox Command Center: NCSD has set up a command center to provide resources, news, and updates to help STD programs, clinicians, and professionals respond to the emerging outbreak of monkeypox in the U.S. The command center information can be found: here

Vaccines:  British health officials will start offering vaccines to some men who have sex with men and are at the highest risk of catching monkeypox, in an effort to curb the outbreak of the disease. Doctors can consider vaccination for some men at the highest risk of exposure, Britain’s Health Security agency said this week.

COVID-19

Vaccines for Kids

Eighteen months after a COVID-19 vaccines were given to adults, the first U.S. coronavirus vaccination ages 6 months and 5 years began this week. Pediatricians, drugstores, hospitals, and community vaccination centers began to administer first doses of two vaccines to children: the Pfizer-BioNTech product to children ages 6 months through 4 years; and the Moderna vaccine to children 6 months through 5 years old. Some parents say the vaccine trials conducted among young children were too small to satisfy their safety concerns and some parents are stating that they will wait and see how children react to the vaccines, before having their children inoculated.

Abortion

More than a quarter of the nearly 800 abortion clinics in the U.S. would quickly shut down if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, according to newly released research. The nation’s highest court is expected to issue a decision by the end of the month on whether to upend 50 years of legal precedent guaranteeing the right to abortion in the U.S. A draft opinion signaling that the top court intends to overrule federal protections for the procedure was leaked by Politico in early May.